1. Field of Invention
This invention relates generally to intrusion detection and access control in enterprise computer networks.
2. Prior Art
Many network-based services control whether access to their service is permitted by remote users. These services require users of the service to be authenticated, and the services follow an access control decision function with a policy or rule set to determine which users are permitted access to the service.
In order to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate access to resources, even where the policy or rule set grants access, some existing prior art network-based services extend the decision function to incorporate the date and time that the request is being made. For example, the service may deny access requests that are received outside of normal working hours for the business running the service.
Some prior art systems include a method for determining the geographic location of a user connecting across the Internet to a web site, a network-based service. This method can be used by a web site to control access to a particular element of the web site to different categories of users based on the geographic location of the user making the request.